Act of Betrayal (8 page)

The Clower house was just a few blocks away. In Surfside everything is just a few blocks away. I rejoined the traffic jam to drive by on the chance someone would be there. The house was painted white, a neat one-story bungalow with a one-car garage.

I rang the bell and waited as a bright yellow front loader groaned by just a dozen feet away from the small front porch. A tarp covered what looked like an old metal love seat. After a delay, a masked woman inched open the door. She wore a mask.

Her nose and mouth were covered. The only people I have seen wearing similar masks, other than medical personnel, are homicide detectives dealing with badly decomposed corpses.

“Hi,” I said uncertainly, introducing myself. “Did I interrupt something?” Was she performing surgery on her kitchen table? Or something worse?

She pulled down her mask. “Come in,” she blurted, hustling me inside as though a posse were hot on my heels. “Quick!” She slammed the door shut behind us with a sigh of relief. “Whew!” She sucked in a deep breath and rubbed at her reddened eyes. “That roadwork coats everything with dust. They've been at it for three months now and my allergies are driving me crazy. It's impossible to keep it out of here. The dust and the fumes filter in through every nook and cranny.”

She swallowed another gulp of air and smiled. “Thanks for coming.” Like her missing son, Vanessa Clower was fair-haired and blue-eyed. In her late thirties, she was slim-hipped, wearing blue jeans and a paint-spattered, faded blue T-shirt. An artist. She worked at home.

The inside of the house shone, sterile and shiny, no rugs, doilies, or heavy drapes, as though she had cleared the decks to better combat the clouds of powdery dust and grit churned up by the equipment outside.

“The only relief is when it rains,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “There are still months to go, they're replacing the town's entire sewer system and not a minute too soon. You should see the standing water when we have a shower. Come on out here. I'll just be a minute. I'm working on something.”

I followed as she padded barefoot to a Florida room at the rear of the house, far from the din in the street. Two large canvases rested side by side on the floor, a carpet of newspapers beneath them. One was blank, the other had been sprayed with glossy black enamel. She hunkered down over the black one and began to squeeze lines, blobs, and squiggles of rich, vivid color directly onto the canvas from big thick white plastic tubes marked Mars Black, Naphthol Crimson, Quinacridone Violet, Yellow Ochre, and Raw Sienna. I itched to try it. It looked like fun, like the finger-painting I loved in kindergarten until I got in trouble for taking off shoes and socks and winding up with paint between my toes, on my knees, and all over my clothes.

She added shades of Burnt Umber and Permanent Green Light at the bottom, liberal amounts of Cobalt Blue across the top and Indo Orange Red, streaming like sunlight across the center. Then she carefully placed the second canvas face down on the first, took a heavy wooden rolling pin and rolled it out as colors squished out the sides, like mashing down a burger loaded with catsup, mustard, and mayo.

I watched, fascinated, as she expertly peeled apart the canvases, now fascinating mirror images of riotous color. She added a rapier-blade slash of white across the face of each, then picked up what looked like a large corrugated drop ceiling panel, a network of tiny open plastic windows, aligned it atop the first canvas, and, still barefoot, stepped carefully onto the panel. She walked back and forth several times, pressing it evenly onto the canvas. When she peeled away the panel, the canvas was imprinted with a mosaic-screen-like finish. She completed the same process on the second canvas.

“That's it,” she said, smiling, wiping her hands on a rag. “You have to work fast before it dries.”

“What do you call this?”

She cocked her head. “Abstract expressionism.”

“No, I mean this technique.”

She shrugged. “Just something I evolved on my own. Everybody has their own style. I'm getting these ready for the Labor Day Taste of the Arts show in Fort Lauderdale.”

Nice, though my taste in art is more traditional. I never understand people who pay big bucks for canvases daubed by chimps or performing elephants who wield paintbrushes with their trunks. She must have read my look. “Several new office complexes are using these companion pieces together. They sell for about twelve hundred dollars a set,” she said casually. “Seven fifty when they're sold individually.”

I was impressed.

“Would you like a glass of orange juice?”

I followed her into the kitchen. The appliances were gleaming chrome, the only personal touch a child's drawings posted on the refrigerator along with a color photo. She, her son, and a little girl about four, their smiles captured at a beach picnic.

“My daughter,” she said, pouring orange juice from a glass pitcher. “She's eight now, in school today. I always loved working at home when the kids were small. Now I wish I had someplace to go.” We sat in her breakfast nook as she repeated the details of her son's disappearance.

“We've tried everything,” she said softly. “We're absolutely baffled.”

She knew exactly where I was going, taking no offense when I began to question her ex-husband's story.

“I believe him,” she said simply. “For all his faults, Edwin is not a violent man. We broke up after he started something with the new secretary he'd hired. She knew we'd been having problems and moved right in on him. That was just the final blow to a shaky relationship. I blame him, as he does himself, for letting David walk out.

“He's a good father, but it was the macho factor. They are so alike, those two. Neither one likes to admit he's wrong. He thought David would be back. When he wasn't, he assumed he'd come home. The games people play.” Her curly shoulder-length hair bounced as she shook her head.

“What do you think?” I asked.

She glanced at the happy photo on the fridge. “He's out there somewhere and I don't see how he could be alone. He's not a resourceful boy, he couldn't live off the land. It's been so long, now. Would you like some tea?”

She got up quickly, poured bottled water into a stainless steel teakettle, switched on a burner, and sat down again.

“I was struck by your story and that other boy's picture in the paper. The resemblance. And I admit that I was jealous that he got the press and the attention when nobody seems to care that David is missing.”

“You should have called. I didn't know.”

“I tried to contact the media. I called a TV station once, when they had all the publicity about that Miami college girl who disappeared in Atlanta. But if it's not a tiny child or a beautiful young woman, they're not interested.”

“You think he hitchhiked?”

She shrugged and sighed. “He had no money with him. I think he may have done it before, although I had warned him.”

“Is he street smart? Could he handle himself if somebody picked him up … and got weird?”

Gingerly, she touched her tongue to the corner of her mouth as though it was painfully tender. “To a degree, the way most kids are street smart these days.
If the person was a criminal with a gun or a knife … no. My son was only twelve when he was taken.”

“You don't think he ran away?”

“No,” she said, as the teakettle began to whistle. She went to a shiny white cabinet, removed two mugs and a tin of tea bags. “Initially I entertained that possibility. He was disgusted and angry about our divorce. So was I. My husband had dumped me for the new secretary he'd hired. He was mad as hell at his dad that night—but he would never stay away this long. And he wasn't mad at me.” She placed a steaming mug in front of me and resumed her seat. “He loves us, he likes his school, and he gets along well with his sister. And he likes his creature comforts, his bike, his video games, his own TV in his room, his favorite foods in the fridge. What's to run from?”

She looked at me, her eyes hopeful, as though I might provide the answer. I had none.

She stirred her tea and put her spoon down carefully. “It's a constant pain, like a knife twisting in my heart every time the phone or the doorbell rings. I always think it's him, or about him. It's odd, I developed all these allergies, at my age, since this happened. My work has become very dark.” She gazed toward the Florida room.

“The innocence is gone,” she decided, nodding, then raised her eyes to mine. “The worst possible truth is better than being left in limbo like this.

“I'll offer a reward,” she said briskly. “Edwin and I have discussed it. We can offer five thousand dollars.”

We finished our tea and her wide eyes followed as I got up to leave. “When are you coming back?” she asked matter-of-factly, as though it were a given.

“Soon,” I promised, hesitating. “I'll call you.”

I escaped the dust storm, traveling at a crawl until traffic began to move at Seventy-ninth Street, then drove west to the new Metro-Dade police headquarters near the Palmetto Expressway. There I found the case of Lars Sjowall, age fourteen, slender, blond, blue-eyed. A dozen Swedish exchange students had visited Miami for a week before returning home after a year in this country. The night before their departure, Lars wanted to see a horror movie playing at a multiplex within walking distance of their motel. None of his companions wanted to join him, so he went alone.

They never saw him again. Police theorized that he didn't want to leave this country and had run off to see more of America. He left behind his passport, money, clothes, his toothbrush, and all the gifts and souvenirs he had planned to take home to his family in Sweden. Neither they nor his host family in Indiana ever heard from him.

That was two years ago.

I also checked out Butch Beltrán. Still missing. The detective had recently spoken to a family member who had called for information. Butch had run away before, but had always returned in days. This time it had been five months.

I made a pit stop at the office to write the German tourist story. The fugitive and his key to the city were long gone.

Then I went to Miami police headquarters and found two more. William and Michael Kearns, twelve-and thirteen-year-old brothers, missing for nearly a year. Both slender, fair-haired, blue-eyed. Went to a carnival in the Grove. Never came home. Runaways, the cops assumed.

Something prickled at the back of my neck as I looked at their pictures.

Dade County sprawls over 2,109 square miles. Two and a half million people live in Greater Miami, which has a vast unincorporated area and twenty-seven municipalities. Most have their own police departments. All take missing-persons reports.

I still had twenty-one police departments to check.

I passed through the guarded gate and cruised the shaded stretch of Garden Drive where Charles Randolph was last seen. Golden afternoon sunlight splashed through a lush canopy of foliage. Serenity reigned behind the walled estates of the rich and powerful. The only people visible were a uniformed nanny pushing her tiny charge in a pram, and some yardmen at work removing coconuts and cutting back the branches of top-heavy trees. The property owner had probably been spooked by weatherman scare tactics. One tabloid-style TV show even plays the theme from
Jaws
when reporting the formation of tropical storms. Every year forecasters solemnly announce that South Florida is overdue for the Big One since we haven't been hit by a hurricane since 1965.

I ignored my incessantly chirping beeper. Gretchen. That woman did not know when to quit. She paged me again, over and over and over, until I finally yanked the damn thing off my belt and flung it into the backseat. Whatever she wanted could wait, I thought, hoping it was only her usual annoying petty antics and not some major breaking news story that I was missing. There was no urgency in the routine chatter on my police scanner, except for an overturned truck that had spilled an entire load of roofing nails across the fast lane on the big curve of the Palmetto Expressway. Another rush hour from hell.

The more I brainstormed about the missing boys, the more I kept arriving back at square one. Apparently they didn't know each other, attend the same school, belong to the same scout troop, or live in the same neighborhood. Charles Randolph was cheerful and industrious. David Clower was angry about his parents' divorce. Butch Beltrán apparently had a troubled past and a history of running away. Lars Sjowall was alone, six thousand miles from home. I knew little about the Kearns brothers.

But all they had in common so far was that they were slender, young, blue-eyed, and fair-haired, and the fact that they were gone.

Reluctantly, I drove back to the paper and walked into the newsroom, beeper in place on my belt. As I expected, Gretchen zeroed in like a heat-seeking missile.

“My beeper?” I asked incredulously, as she launched into a harangue. I removed it and stared at the device quizzically. “It's on,” I told her. I tested it. “It's working.” I gazed at her innocently. “Are you sure you dialed the right number, Gretchen?”

But she had the upper hand. “Did you hear about the truck on the Palmetto?”

“Yup,” I said, “I'm right on top of it.”

“And the press conference?”

Uh-oh. “Which one?”

She smiled malevolently, threw back her shoulders, and jutted her pointy breasts at me. Was that a Wonderbra? “On the Alex Aguirre case.” She smirked and consulted her watch. “You're five minutes late for it right now. I didn't have anybody else to send.”

Oh, God, I thought, stomach lurching. “Did they make an arrest?”

“That's the impression I got. I suggest you get yourself over there and ask them.”

I lunged for a fresh notebook. During phone checks that morning they didn't even have a suspect. At least that's what they had told me.

“At the police station?” I headed for the elevator.

“No,” she said, “at WTOP.”

Odd, I thought, cops wouldn't announce an arrest or a break in the case at the television station.

Gretchen said something as I brushed by her. It took a moment to sink in. “From now on stay in touch with the city desk, Britt. Save your social life for your day off.”

I was already on the elevator; she had turned away. “What?” I yelped in indignation. Did she just imply that I had spent the afternoon…? The doors closed and I screamed all the way to the lobby.

As usual, Gretchen was a fountain of misinformation. No arrest, no cops. Station management had called the press conference to announce a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Alex Aguirre's killers.

Though twenty minutes late, I missed nothing but the bickering as station officials got their jollies by forcing all their competitors' news crews to move their equipment to inconvenient locations at the back of the room. TV people take forever to set up anyway. If Jesus Christ appeared to proclaim the end of the world they would interrupt, ask him to hold it until they set up their equipment, then demand that he start again from the top.

The widow was present, eyes swollen, dressed in black. The station had her tied up, refusing to let her answer questions from competing reporters. After their poor coverage the day of the bombing, they had had broadcast exclusives on every newscast since. Home videos of the happy family, footage of the bewildered fatherless children, the all-night vigil at the funeral home, the weeping widow pleading for anyone with information to call a special number at the station, or, as an afterthought, the police. The poor woman was caught in the clutches of the news director. The rest of the press corps grumbled, but I understood. Shocked, scared, and alone, she had kids to raise. WTOP-TV, her husband's employer, was probably the only security in her life at the moment.

I wondered what it had been like for my mother when she was left alone with me.

Lottie was there shooting art for the final. “Wait till you hear what Gretchen said to me,” I told her.

“Let's go for coffee,” she whispered.

“We can get it back at the office. I have a couple of stories to write.”

“No, now.”

“What?” She looked vibrant and excited; she had combed her hair. That could only mean one thing.

“I just passed La Esquina de Tejas. His car is parked outside. I wanna drop in for coffee.”

I sighed. “You sure he's still there?”

“If we stop jawing and get over there, he will be. It'll be a surprise. He asked me to dinner but I had to tell 'im I was working. I felt terrible, poor thing really wanted to see me.”

The restaurant was only five minutes away. We took my car, so if she decided to stay, Stosh could drive her back to her company Chrysler parked at WTOP.

Hungry, I decided as we walked in that I wanted a Cuban sandwich. I stopped mid-stride. The Polish Prince, jaunty as ever, sat at a secluded table. He was not dining alone.

“Lottie,” I turned, hoping to detour her in time. Damn him, I thought. By now I really wanted a sandwich.

But she never missed a beat. She swept past me, to his table. Mouth open, I watched.

In intimate conversation, holding both hands of his companion, a striking young brunette in a red sundress, he did not see Lottie until she spoke. More a whine than a word.

“Ssstoooosh.”

I had never heard such a sound come out of Lottie before. He looked up, with the expression of an escapee suddenly aware that the sheriff has got the drop on him.

“Ssstooosh. The kids are huungry, honey. When are you coming hooome? They keep crying for their daddy.”

He swallowed. “Lottie.” His smile was sickly, eyes pleading as he looked past her and saw me.

I smiled back, shook my head faintly, and sat at the counter to watch.

The young woman at the table dropped her napkin and stared at Lottie.

“Kristin,” Stosh said anxiously. He got to his feet. “I want you to meet—”

“Don't feel baaad,” Lottie whined at the woman. “It happens all the time, I'm uuused to it.”

As I followed Lottie out the door, Stosh Gorski, face pained, was fast-talking Kristin, who had pushed away her plate and was picking up her purse.

“Damn, Lottie,” I said admiringly. “That was good.”

“That calaboose shyster,” she muttered, climbing into my car. “He was all over her like a duck on a June bug. Let's git outta here. You was right about him all along, Britt. All I want to give that man now is a grenade with the pin pulled.”

We laughed, as I drove off into the dusk.